Just to point out that this optimisation not just done for tail-recursive calls but it is done for every tail-call. It is a TCO.

One of the simplest pitfalls that someone might intuitively write and end up breaking TCO is to include an operator outside of the final recursive call, but still on the final line, such as:

def recursive(0), do: 0

def recursive(n) when n > 1, do: 1 + recursive(n - 1) 

I’ve done it myself and see it in others’ code I’ve reviewed.

As a fun aside, if you’re on OSX, you can use time -l ... when running any shell command to observe small details about a limited set syscalls as well as memory allocations during the execution, and you can see that the above style uses more and more memory the larger argument you give it, but a properly TCO’d function will grow memory usage by argument size much more slowly, but still non-zero.

It doesn’t translate perfectly because our runtimes have such different semantics, but Haskell’s wiki article about their versions of fold-from-left and fold-from-right has some interesting insights here too, and I think the “visualization” they offer by expanding the math functions captures what I’m trying to express above pretty well:

foldr (+) 0 [1..1000000] -->
1 + (foldr (+) 0 [2..1000000]) -->
1 + (2 + (foldr (+) 0 [3..1000000])) -->
1 + (2 + (3 + (foldr (+) 0 [4..1000000]))) -->
1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + (foldr (+) 0 [5..1000000])))) -->
-- ...
-- ...  My stack overflows when there's a chain of around 500000 (+)'s !!!
-- ...  But the following would happen if you got a large enough stack:
-- ...
1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + (... + (999999 + (foldr (+) 0 [1000000]))...)))) -->
1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + (... + (999999 + (1000000 + ((foldr (+) 0 []))))...)))) -->

1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + (... + (999999 + (1000000 + 0))...)))) -->
1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + (... + (999999 + 1000000)...)))) -->
1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + (... + 1999999 ...)))) -->

1 + (2 + (3 + (4 + 500000499990))) -->
1 + (2 + (3 + 500000499994)) -->
1 + (2 + 500000499997) -->
1 + 500000499999 -->
500000500000

AppSignal’s article is explaining it quite okay.